Categories: Articles

The Million Dollar Homepage Proves That Small Is The New Big

Have you see The Million Dollar Homepage? The Million Dollar Homepage has a simple online advertising model: you pay by the pixel in hopes of owning “a piece of Internet history,” as the site says.
Alex Tew – a university student from the UK came up with the idea as a way to pay his tuition… and at the rate he’s going, there will be a lot of money leftover.
Pixels can only be bought in blocks of 10×10 ($100 US per block).
How’s he doing?
Most of it is sold, as you can see here: The Million Dollar Homepage.
The last lot of pixels are being pimped on eBay by Alex for $21,400 (but the bidding may have picked up by the time you read this). You can view the eBay auction here: The Million Dollar Homepage eBay Auction.
Alex and his The Million Dollar Homepage have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC and many more.
AdRants ran a great post entitled, Million Dollar Homepage Causes Entrepreneurial Depression. Here’s a quote:
“American Copywriter lists five psychological stages of dealing with Million Dollar Homepage psychosis from denial to resentment to rationalization to depression to, well, blogging about it.”
Guess where I sit in this analysis?
More than anything else, The Million Dollar Homepage proves that any kind of new advertising model can work if the execution is right.
Alex is leveraging great PR, the Blogosphere, word of mouth and viral marketing to keep the value (and hype) up. Whether or not people will care that their pixels are still up in five years (or five weeks) is undecided.
The Million Dollar Homepage has an email newsletter sign-up and a Million Dollar Homepage Blog.
Note to Alex: At this point, I would not worry about paying off your tuition anymore or taking care of your parents. My guess is your inbox is full of people who want to hire you.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.